Inferring the Chinese State’s Personnel Strategy from Vacancy Chains, 1978 - 2012
Shilin Jia
University of Chicago
Bigger picture
- Data: Inter-administration transfers of high-level Chinese political elites
- RQ: Based on the transfer patterns of Chinese political elites, what can we say about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s staffing strategy?
Two perspectives for studying mobility of elites
- Individual perspective
- views mobility from the perspective of the individual who moves through positions
- important factors: loyalty, meritocracy, social capital
- Organizational perspective
- views mobility from the perspective of the organization responsible for filling positions, e.g. institutionalism
- Our perspective: “Structure follows strategy” (Chandler 1990: 14)
Vacancy chains
- People cannot freely move inside a system, but vacancies can (White 1970)
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Data
- Source: CVs of political elites of the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) (http://cped.nccu.edu.tw/)
- Who are they?
- Chinese political elites who have reached the level of vice-minister or vice-governor after (N ~ 4000)
- Period: 1978-2011
- Method: computer-assisted coding
Computer-assisted coding
Different types of organizational hires
- Internal hires: specialization
- External hires: integration
- Isolated transfers
- more likely initiated by locals an ad hoc bases
- Chained transfers
- more likely orchestrated by the state
Isolated vs. chained transfers
Manual checks by me and 3 research assistants
- All chains and isolated transfers are complete
China’s transition to market economy
Organizational perspective
- Departure point: Soviet planning system as a giant factory organized by central planning agencies
- Decentralization as a solution (Chandler 1990; Fligstein 1985) and M-form transformation (Xu 2011; Qian and Weingast 1996, 1997)
- Piecemeal transition, a ”dual-track” system (Naughton 1995; Shirk 1993)
- Centrifugal force: decentralization (Landry, 2008); regional protection and bureaucratic fragmentation (Lieberthal 1992; Li and Bachman 1989)
- Centripetal force: personnel management (Landry, 2008; Naughton and Yang 2004; Xu 2011)
CCP’s organizational strategy
- nomenklatura (职务名称表)
- reserved cadres (后备干部) and “third echelon” (第三梯队)
- long-planned sponsorship through orchestrated transfers
Vacancy chains as strategy
Longer chain lengths over time
Orchestration: Longer lengths than expected by chance
- Markovian (null) hypothesis: long chains were successions of independent isolated transfers
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Expected chain lengths under Markovian models
More lateral transfers in vacancy chains
|
chain length
|
demotion (%)
|
lateral (%)
|
promotion (%)
|
|
1
|
3.2
|
56.5
|
40.3
|
|
2
|
4.6
|
62.2
|
33.2
|
|
3
|
6.8
|
63.4
|
29.8
|
|
4
|
10.7
|
60.5
|
28.8
|
|
5
|
5.1
|
67.7
|
27.2
|
- Administrative ranks
- -1: No.1 person 一把手 (e.g. provincial party secretary, minister)
- -1.5: No.2 person (e.g. governor, standing deputy minister)
- -2: All positions at the vice-governor/deputy-minister level
- -3: All sub-province/ministry-level positions
Where do vacancies start and where do they terminate?
- In early periods, vacancies start in ministries and terminate in provinces
- In later periods, vacancies start in provinces and are less likely to terminate.
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Where do vacancies visit?
- Centripetal force
- The central state tries to penetrate its subunits through external transfers via vacancy chains
- Centrifugal force
- Powerful local strongholds (e.g. Shanghai and Guangdong) try to internally absorb their vacancies as much as possible
Organizational hieararchy
- Assumption: head(unit \(i\)) \(\rightarrow\) head(unit \(j\)) implies \(i \leq j\) where the arrow means a top-level lateral transfer.
- Ranking provinces and ministries through network triangularization (Jia and Xu 2018)
- Decade ranks correlate with provincial per capita GDP at 0.6~0.7
Vacancy chains tend to start in high-ranking places, cascade downwards, and terminate in high-ranking places
They tend to terminate in high-ranking provinces
But not high-ranking ministries
Terminal probability by per capita GDP rank
|
Per capita GDP quintile
|
1
|
2
|
3
|
4
|
5
|
|
1978-1991
|
0.44
|
0.3
|
0.5
|
0.62
|
0.59
|
|
1992-2001
|
0.42
|
0.44
|
0.31
|
0.63
|
0.58
|
|
2002-2011
|
0.37
|
0.35
|
0.28
|
0.47
|
0.48
|
|
All
|
0.4
|
0.37
|
0.32
|
0.54
|
0.53
|
Let’s switch to the individual perspective
What happened to the elites involved in these transfers?
- Suppression hypothesis: VCs transferred powerful elites out of their local bases
- Sponsership hypothesis: By moving people (presumably pre-screened officials on reserved-cadre lists), VCs put them into faster career tracks
Short-term tradeoff
- Mean des-ori status differential by admin rank differential by decade
|
decade
|
1978-1991
|
1992-2001
|
2002-2011
|
|
demotion
|
0.43
|
0.42
|
0.3
|
|
lateral
|
0.19
|
0.06
|
0.09
|
|
promotion
|
-0.09
|
-0.13
|
-0.2
|
Short-term tradeoff
- Higher trade-off for chained transfers (not shown in this presentation)
- Still need to run some more regressions
Long-term benefit
- The involved elites can also expect that their coming stops are not their final destinations but stepstones for further career advancement
Hypothesis: everything else being equal, an official involved in a longer chain should have a brighter future than his counterpart.
Regression
- Unit of analysis: transfer-person
- DV: Whether the person involved in a transfer is promoted in the next Party Congress.
- IV: VC Length
- Control: Current rank and destination
Temporal effects
Summary
- As China transitioned into decentralized market economy, the Party employed orchestrated vacancy chains to transfer its trusted elite members through a wide range of subunits
- Strong provinces were, to some degree, more able to shield themselves
- Elites involved in vacancy chains, in general, benefited from the transfers through either getting promotions or moving to better places
- The VCs put those elites into strategic positions, not only for the present, but also for the future.
- Strategy of organizational sponsorship